N.J. Corruption Case Snags Mayors, Assemblyman and Rabbis
Posted on Sat Jul 25, 2009 at 08:24:00 PM EST
Tags: New Jersey corruption case (all tags)
Three New Jersey Mayors, two Assemblyman and five rabbis were arrested this week following a two year federal corruption and money laundering investigation.
A two-year corruption and international money-laundering investigation stretching from the Jersey Shore to Brooklyn to Israel and Switzerland culminated in charges against 44 people on Thursday, including three New Jersey mayors, two state assemblymen and five rabbis, the authorities said.[More....]
The case began with bank fraud charges against a member of an insular Syrian Jewish enclave centered in a seaside town. But when that man became a federal informant and posed as a crooked real estate developer offering cash bribes to obtain government approvals, it mushroomed into a political scandal that could rival any of the most explosive and sleazy episodes in New Jersey’s recent past.It was replete with tales of the illegal sales of body parts; of furtive negotiations in diners, parking lots and boiler rooms; of nervous jokes about “patting down” a man who turned out to indeed be an informant; and, again and again, of the passing of cash — once in a box of Apple Jacks cereal stuffed with $97,000.
....Even veteran political observers were taken aback by the scope of the investigation. The mayors of Hoboken, Secaucus and Ridgefield were among those arrested.
The Feds are distinguishing between two types of crimes:
The authorities laid out two separate schemes, one involving money laundering that led to rabbis and members of the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn and in the Jersey Shore town of Deal, where many of them have summer homes. The other dealt with political corruption and bribery and involved public officials mostly in Jersey City and Hoboken, where the pace of development has been particularly intense in recent years.Linking the two schemes was the federal informant who was not named in court papers but whom people involved with the investigation identified as Solomon Dwek, a failed real estate developer and philanthropist who was arrested in May 2006 on charges of passing a bad $25 million check at a bank in Monmouth County, N.J.
Some details of the alleged scam and real estate developer-turned-informant Dwek:
Early on, Mr. Dwek helped investigators penetrate an extensive network of money laundering that involved rabbis in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, where the Syrian Jewish community is based, and in Deal and Elberon, towns on the Jersey Shore.Mr. Dwek, a well-known member of the Syrian Jewish community whose parents founded the Deal Yeshiva, never concealed that he was facing bank fraud charges, instead telling targets, who included three rabbis in Brooklyn and two in New Jersey, that he was bankrupt and trying to conceal his assets, according to people involved in the case. The targets, in turn, accepted bank checks Mr. Dwek made out to charities that they oversaw, deducted a fee, and returned the rest to him in cash.
Much of the cash they provided him came from Israel, and some of that in turn came from a Swiss banker, prosecutors said. All told, some $3 million was laundered for Mr. Dwek since June 2007, prosecutors said.
On to the Rabbis arrested:
In the money laundering scheme, the rabbis arrested included Saul J. Kassin, 87, a leader of the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn and New Jersey; Mordchai Fish and Lavel Schwartz, both rabbis in Brooklyn; and Eliahu Ben Haim and Edmund Nahum, who lead congregations in Deal.Some of the allegations are gruesome:
Another man in Brooklyn, Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, was accused of enticing vulnerable people to give up a kidney for $10,000 and then selling the organ for $160,000. Mr. Dwek pretended to be soliciting a kidney on behalf of someone and Mr. Rosenbaum said that he had been in business of buying organs for years, according to the complaint.
Here's a chart showing how the case unfolded. Among the public officials arrested were:
"Mayor Peter J. Cammarano III of Hoboken, who was a City Council member before he took office as mayor on July 1, and Mayor Dennis Elwell of Secaucus, both Democrats; Assemblyman L. Harvey Smith of Jersey City, also a Democrat; and Assemblyman Daniel M. Van Pelt, a Republican from Ocean County."
Here's the story of the Informant, Solomon Dwek. How did the people of Deal react to his arrest?
The arrests seemed to be the focus of every conversation in Deal on Thursday. Some people defended the rabbis who were arrested; others spoke of broken trust. “They don’t know what to believe,” said one resident, one of many who refused to give their names.Dwek was also a philanthropist:
Yet even as Mr. Dwek was accused of stealing or mismanaging millions of dollars, he was apparently giving away plenty. One beneficiary was the Lumia Theater in Long Branch, home of the New Jersey Repertory Company, which once included the 50-seat Pearl and Solomon Dwek Little Theater, named for Mr. Dwek and his wife.More on Dwek here. As to the population in general:He helped his sister start a yeshiva, and he aided families and students who could not pay their bills. “Before his empire came tumbling down,” said the person who said he knows the family, “he was giving more and more of it away.”
Deal boasts a significant population of Orthodox Sephardic Jews, mainly of Syrian extraction. In the 2000 Census, 16.4% of Deal residents identified as being of Syrian heritage, the greatest percentage of Syrian Americans in any municipality in the country.[8] Deal's population swells to over 6,000 during the summer, many of them Syrian Jews.
Deal has always interested me as I had some good friends many years ago who were part of the Syrian Jewish community in Deal. While they were not from New Jersey, they grew up spending every summer in Deal and as adults, took their own children there. From their stories, it was pretty ritzy back then (I've never been so I don't know if it's changed.)
Here's the latest from the New York Times on Hoboken Mayor Peter Cammarano's fall from from a mayor who ran as a reformer to a defendant.
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